Quote from: Digitalelf on January 16, 2024, 11:03:09 PM
I'm curious as to how anyone going on to this web site would expect others members to follow any form of left-leaning political issues knowing just who runs this forum. I'm pretty new here, but I'd be willing to bet that most come here because they're tired of having to watch every word they say on 99.9% of the other TTRPG forums out there.

As to Jaquay's body of work: "FR5 - The Savage Frontier" is my favorite Forgotten Realms supplement.

Truthfully I dont care about who runs this website.  I am here to talk about role playing games.   Whether TheRPGPundit is here or not doesn't matter one bit to me.

Quote from: pawsplay on January 17, 2024, 03:57:49 PM

That Jennelle sounds like an asshole.  I liked Paul better.

Quote from: pawsplay on January 17, 2024, 03:57:49 PM

Dripping with toxic narcissism. I feel way less bad. 

Addendum: way to shatter the stereotype of it being about language policing and a power trip.

I've just started reading over Caverns of Thracia, which looks amazing. I love how she weaves in all this Greek myth and history, with even a timeline of when and how the dungeon was constructed. I've been pondering how to use it as a foray into OSR stuff.

Here's a war story from Jennell about early days in the hobby:

Quote from: Jennell JaquaysI'll tell you or my origin story in games in 1975 October. My younger brother who is actually the gamer in the family called me on the phone at work and said hey I just got this magazine and there's these reviews in there for this interesting game that I think you'll like. And he read over the phone these two very short reviews of Dungeons and Dragons that appeared in the Space Gamer issue number 2. I listened to what he was saying and I could almost literally feel my life pivoting and changing and going in a new direction at that point.

Once I got my hands on on the magazine (my brother lived two miles away) I ordered this the D&D set and Grayhawk and Chainmail and waited for them with bated breath to come. The first thing that came was Grayhawk and Chainmail. That was my exposure to what D&D was like and so I had a totally wrong idea of what the game was because from those two products the actual white box was back ordered and it wouldn't be until February of 1976 because of school breaks and then a Europe trip and then back in school where my friends had already snagged the box out of my mailbox at school. They started playing themselves or at least started reading the rules that's when we started actually being able to play.  There was a very small hand of a handful of us who were playing mostly on my dorm room floor. Understand we were also at a very small Evangelical Christian College in the midwest, so nobody knew what we understood what we were doing at that point. We were just a bunch of fantasy fans figuring out how to make games. Being a creative person and having a graphics design background already I was an art major. I had done work on college newspapers so I knew how to do pre-press production the way it was done back in the mid 70s. So I said hey, no one's making stuff for D&D out there, maybe we could make our own and put out a fan magazine based on it.

I had a couple two of my friends Mark and the Merle and we decided yeah we'll do that.  I was already getting stuff from TSR at that point. I think I subscribed to their their magazine that later became The Dragon, and I wrote a letter to Tim Cask because he was the editor and I said "Hey if we produce a fan magazine called The Dungeoneer are we stepping on your trademarks or rights in any way?" Tim wrote me a postcard back and said nope not at all... just make sure you don't include lots of our content in your magazine and that's how we got permission. As you said there was no Internet -- we had the mail and we sent postcards. So that's how that started.

We started trying to figure out what kind of content would be in it. I came up with the idea that "Hey let's put an adventure in the magazine" and we'll also do things like new monsters, new magic items, and Mark wrote a short in this installment-based story. We all we all contributed to it and then I did the production where my friend Mark had a typewriter with a carbon film ribbon so I would go through and type up the article in columns and then go back through and figure out how I would justify it by adding spaces between words then retype it on his carbon film which gave it a really nice clean edged look and we paste those up on big sheets of paper and take them off to the printer. That summer we got the first magazine ready to go it was June 1976 and by the time we got the printer they got about 200 issues back from the printer. We had been researching well how do we get this to the gamer's hands and the way we did that was we skimmed magazines and bulletin boards and found places that people had been posting their address say they were looking for players they weren't necessarily all D&D players and we found out that had its own side effect later, but we just sent out a hundred free copies now the positive side is that James M. Ward of TSR was our first subscriber.

He's the guy who created Metamorphosis Alpha. We also got letters back from people who were really mad at us for sending this to them and said never do this again... D&D is destroying the tabletop gaming hobby... So we never sent them anything again. Wow. So that was just brute force finding people soliciting. It got word of mouth out there and we actually started selling them to hobby shops around literally around the world

That was my step into doing work in the game industry. About a year and a half later it was the end of 1978 and we were all either trying to graduate or had graduated. It was getting very difficult to work on the magazine I ended up selling it to someone.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwIcNiOwN0Y

Incidentally, there's a "Memorial Game Jam" being organized, with links for donations to Jaquays' family. It also will donate to a transgender legal fund, so many people here wouldn't be interested, but there's also a link for direct family donations.

https://itch.io/jam/jennell-jaquays-memorial-game-jam

To pawsplay:

Quote from: pawsplay on January 17, 2024, 03:29:52 PM
I've been friends with Jennell on FB for years. Her death personally affects me. All I've asked for is the basic courtesy of someone being called by their name. You're the ghoul. If this were an actual funeral home, and you showed up, and starting calling her by her deadname and using the pronouns you prefer, you would be thrown out.  Maybe in your mind you're a big hero. All you've done really is try to erase who she is.

I'm sorry for the loss, pawsplay. It sounds like she would be on your side in general, but I'm also not sure that she'd want all the fuss here on this thread. In this thread, many posters have used her preferred names and pronouns, but for those who haven't, they aren't being convinced by the demands made, and if anything, the arguing has made things less respectful. Personally, I'm happy to argue the point in other threads, but I'm trying not to here.

Thanks for sharing those links jhkim.

Quote from: Grognard GM on January 14, 2024, 02:13:45 PM

Quote from: JeremyR on January 14, 2024, 02:04:19 PM
And I'm pretty sure Venger Satanis wasn't his birth name.

His birthname was Henry Satanis Jr. They named the dog Venger.

I laughed

Quote from: zer0th on January 16, 2024, 10:44:27 PM
I wasn't going to post here because I don't have much to say about the departed. I just found out that I have been using one of Jaquays' books for a campaign in the past year: Savage Frontier. But since this has been derailed beyond salvage, I will add that pawsplay attempts to build arguments out of State authority are pathetic. I wonder whether or not pawsplay would be such a defender of legalism, if Jaquays and him lived in a country that didn't allow one to change one's legal gender. Would you complain about the people that here in this thread decided to use Jennell because Saudi Arabia DMV didn't recognize Jennell, only Paul?

I wish my post and pawsplay's and all replies to him would be deleted from this thread.

So how is Savage Frontier?

Quote from: Llew ap Hywel on January 17, 2024, 05:43:10 AM
Really sad to hear this, Griffin Mountain was easily one of the best products of its time and is an obvious inspiration for Mythras Monster Island.

I'm no art expert but I think Jennell did some great pieces.

I've ever even heard of Griffin Mountain. What is it?

Quote from: pawsplay on January 17, 2024, 03:29:52 PM

Quote from: honeydipperdavid on January 17, 2024, 03:09:58 PM
But if this fucking asshat showed up at a funeral and started spouting off ideological points using the dead for his own goals, I'd drag him the fuck out of the funeral home and throw him out in disgust.  The only reason I give a fuck is the disrespect this person is showing to the dead, I fucking hate ghouls.

I've been friends with Jennell on FB for years. Her death personally affects me. All I've asked for is the basic courtesy of someone being called by their name. You're the ghoul. If this were an actual funeral home, and you showed up, and starting calling her by her deadname and using the pronouns you prefer, you would be thrown out.  Maybe in your mind you're a big hero. All you've done really is try to erase who she is.

Show of hands. Who here has actually had an interaction with her? Who here actually cried when they got the news? Who promoted the crowdfunding campaign to help her family? If you didn't raise your hand at least once, you're not at the funeral. You're some rando on the Internet whose head is so far up their ass, you think it's your job to lecture everyone on what name should go on the fucking memorial plaque.

I agree with you that you should try and call people by the name they prefer. It's why I called Pundit, Pundit. Even if Pundit has done other things under another name, it's right to respect his preference for name used here.

I agree with you it's polite to call people the gender they prefer to be called. Even if I find it confusing at times. It doesn't matter to me. It hurts me in no way. I don't get being agitated about it. It doesn't seem relevant to the discussion.

In this case, I don't think the discussion about transgenderism is productive and it seems to be distracting the discussion from discussing this person's lifes work. Work I am genuinely curious about, and there are many people here who know a lot more about it than me and seem willing to talk about it.

Quote from: Mistwell on January 17, 2024, 11:57:14 PM

Quote from: Llew ap Hywel on January 17, 2024, 05:43:10 AM
Really sad to hear this, Griffin Mountain was easily one of the best products of its time and is an obvious inspiration for Mythras Monster Island.

I'm no art expert but I think Jennell did some great pieces.

I've ever even heard of Griffin Mountain. What is it?

It's a wilderness campaign for RuneQuest, published in 1981, written by Jaquays along with Rudy Kraft and Greg Stafford. I have a copy but have never run it (or played in Glorantha at all - my RQ games used other settings).

https://www.chaosium.com/griffin-mountain-softcover-pod/

Quote from: Mistwell on January 17, 2024, 11:57:14 PM

Quote from: Llew ap Hywel on January 17, 2024, 05:43:10 AM
Really sad to hear this, Griffin Mountain was easily one of the best products of its time and is an obvious inspiration for Mythras Monster Island.

I'm no art expert but I think Jennell did some great pieces.

I've ever even heard of Griffin Mountain. What is it?

One of the best RPG products of all time

No idea how to post images here so thanks jhkim

Quote from: DocJones on January 17, 2024, 09:36:35 PM

Quote from: pawsplay on January 17, 2024, 03:57:49 PM

That Jennelle sounds like an asshole.  I liked Paul better.

Oh wow!

This was written by someone in some seriously bad mental mess.  Massive red flags, massive cry for help.

Quote from: Mistwell on January 17, 2024, 11:56:03 PM
So how is Savage Frontier?

It is pretty good. Every paragraph has something to which you can hook a story. Just grab that hook and start hanging your own stuff there. The boxed set The North also lists Jaquays as one of the authors, and it is basically The Savage Frontier expanded for AD&D2. I am running a campaign for people who played a lot Neverwinter Nights and I started with The Lost Mine of Phandelver moved to 1368 DR, now peppered with plot points and NPCs I built out of Jaquays work on FR to be explored after the mines.

Quote from: zer0th on January 18, 2024, 08:44:51 AM

Quote from: Mistwell on January 17, 2024, 11:56:03 PM
So how is Savage Frontier?

It is pretty good. Every paragraph has something to which you can hook a story. Just grab that hook and start hanging your own stuff there. The boxed set The North also lists Jaquays as one of the authors, and it is basically The Savage Frontier expanded for AD&D2. I am running a campaign for people who played a lot Neverwinter Nights and I started with The Lost Mine of Phandelver moved to 1368 DR, now peppered with plot points and NPCs I built out of Jaquays work on FR to be explored after the mines.

How compatible is it with non DnD games?

Quote from: Cathode Ray on January 17, 2024, 02:26:55 PM

Quote from: pawsplay on January 17, 2024, 01:17:02 PM

Quote from: Abraxus on January 17, 2024, 10:33:46 AM
Sad to see one of those working in the rpg industry pass away.

Are you? You just called her a goat pretending to be a person.

leave it to a racist science denier to not understand literary concepts like metaphor

Talk about being dense and disingenuous on purpose.

Then again the Trolll denies real science and objective reality. Why would a metaphor even register in the trolls carefully constructed personal narrative.